"We have to talk": How Obama and Castro came together

McGovern sensed a distinctly hopeful tone underneath. “We have to talk about the present and the future,” Castro told him. “Because if we talk about the past we will never resolve it.”

“I thought, ‘Maybe this is a guy we can do business with,’ ” McGovern says…

It was also the fulfillment of Obama’s promise in 2008 that he would, under the right conditions, engage in direct diplomacy with the Cuban leadership. He might have acted sooner but for a handful of prisoners — including USAID contractor Alan Gross, who was abducted less than a year into Obama’s presidency — and at least one bungled attempt at freelance diplomacy.

“The changes are really consistent with the road that we’ve been on since the beginning,” says Dan Restrepo, Obama’s top aide for Latin American affairs until mid-2012. “You can connect a pretty direct line from here from a debate in South Carolina [in 2007] where the president first talked about engaging in direct diplomacy with our adversaries, including Castro.”